Audience for This Book

If you're a Perl programmer approaching web services either from curiosity or necessity, you're the person for whom we wrote this book. You'll learn not only what the protocols are and how to use the various Perl toolkits built around them, but how to design your own applications with web services in mind.

This book covers an intersection of XML, networking, and Perl. Your Perl skills should be at the intermediate level; we assume you know how to create and manipulate data structures and create object-oriented modules. Our sample programs use references and objects without comment. The good news is that we don't assume you've already used any of the toolkits we describe ” LWP , SOAP::Lite , among others.

We explain all the XML you'll need for the rest of the book in Chapter 2, so you don't need prior XML exposure (though it might help to make the heavy XML bolus that is SOAP easier to swallow). In terms of networking, we assume you know about IP addresses and ports, but because the various modules we use hide the nasty details of networking, you don't need prior network programming.